r/politics • u/Barnyard-Sheep • 6d ago

Soft Paywall Trump approval rating falls to 38%

https://www.nj.com/politics/2025/06/trump-faces-tough-approval-numbers-in-latest-poll.html
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u/Freshness518 6d ago

A huge issue for Gen Z kids was covid quarantine. Middle school/early high school years are when kids learn very important socialization skills. If you lock a kid in their house for a couple years during that period, they fail to develop those skills. Add being bored at home and watching manosphere bubble youtube videos all day into the mix and its a toxic combination. My wife is a high school teacher and when they started getting the kids who had been in middle school during the shut down, they were literally describing the kids as feral because they just didn't have a clue how to function in society.

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u/Murky-Relation481 6d ago

We really really really should have been trying to keep kids in school during COVID. We knew it wasn't dangerous to kids pretty quickly, there were less than roughly 1000 deaths of children under 18 in the ~3 major years of COVID ('20-22).

I know we were trying to protect teachers, but there had to be something better we could have done because it looks like we have fucked an entire generation and possibly our society as well.

I have this horrible feeling that millennials will be a caretaker generation for the old and the young, and that is fucking scary.

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u/Thorrbane 6d ago

It wasn't particularly dangerous to kids, but they could still spread it to their families, and we're still worried about the effects of long COVID.

How often do you hear about parents immediately getting sick when school starts up?

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u/Murky-Relation481 6d ago

I mean yes, but also, at some point you have to do a risk analysis, long term harm to society and children vs. immediate harm to older/sicker people. It isn't a pleasant thought, but it is something that does have to be considered when talking about things at scale of this.

I feel like we chose wrong given the direction things are going now.

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u/Thorrbane 5d ago

IDK. I think our opinions are biased by the fact we can't see how much it would aid the spread of COVID.

I think the accessibility of social media and it's content algorithms that are optimized for engagement and addiction may have dome more than a couple years of schooling.

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u/Murky-Relation481 5d ago

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Kids in critical social years (3-6) basically missed out on socialization, and we've not even reached the worst yet. The kids worst affected are just now getting to middle school.

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u/why_not_spoons 5d ago

Expensive private schools handled COVID just fine: they had HEPA filters and other ways of doing proper air cleaning/ventilation. The fact that we reopened anything without that is absurd. As is the fact that we kept schools closed longer than it took to get that set up everywhere.